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Under-the-radar apps worth using, from backups to personal finance

Venture capital funding isn’t for every company. Like many other software applications, Moneydance, for personal-finance management, doesn’t have a market valuation of billions, but it’s still worth using.
(Image via Moneydance)

An idea hatched in a dorm room, venture capital funding, and then a billion-dollar payday for the company founders.

That’s one path for technology companies, but it’s not the only path — a fact that’s sometimes forgotten in all of the attention to Twitter, Facebook and countless startups aiming for a public stock offering (or an acquisition by the likes of Google or Apple).

Just because an app or online service doesn’t have a market valuation in the billions and a sizable percentage of the planet as customers doesn’t mean it’s not worth using it.

Have you heard of Moneydance? Pinboard? SuperDuper? Probably not. But these are all technology products I use daily (or close to it), and they’re run by exceptionally small teams — essentially by the people who created them.

There’s a key difference between these companies and many of those you’ll find in the stream of blog posts at TechCrunch, an online publication covering the startup culture. These companies, though making money for their founders (and employees, if they have any), aren’t really about gathering many millions of users. They aren’t about attracting venture capital cash in order to transform themselves into billion-dollar businesses. These companies provide something their customers need and make a living from it.

Take Pinboard, a service for storing and tagging your website favorites, which costs you a one-time fee of about ten dollars. In a way, it’s not really a company: It’s a guy. In fact, that’s what owner Maciej Ceglowski calls himself, “a computer guy,” at the Pinboard website. He’s based in San Francisco and works on Pinboard full-time. “The site has a proven revenue model and has been profitable since launch,” he says. “I intend to run it for many years in its present form.”

Another favorite of mine, SuperDuper, is a backup program for Macintosh computers. I’ve used it for years, as do many longtime Macintosh fans who are obsessive about keeping backups. I recently had a couple of questions related to backing up a new computer, and when I sent a support request, who responded? The founder of the company, David Nanian.

Did you ever get an email from Mark Zuckerberg when you had a snafu with Facebook? I didn’t think so.

Sometimes I opt for an under-the-radar software application or online service because it offers something I can’t find elsewhere. Other times I do so because the brand-name product is too complicated for what I need. That’s why I use Byword, a streamlined text-editing program, for much of my writing. Microsoft Word? It’s got way too many buttons for me. Ditto with Quicken. Instead, I use Moneydance, another program for personal finance management. Look these products up online, and you’ll see photos of teams behind each of them — essentially a couple of software developers.

Some small (or smallish) technology companies wear their independence as a badge of honor. In a blog post, the founder of the iPhone development company tap tap tap, which makes a popular iPhone photography app called Camera+, noted the company had fended off acquisition advances from the likes of Adobe and Twitter. “We greatly value our independence and in all cases, we’ve fended the suitors off and chosen to remain independent,” he wrote, noting that “working for some conglomerate or having bean-counting investors breathing down our necks” wasn’t going to help the company achieve its goals.

Of course, even small teams sometimes have trouble staying small.

I thought about mentioning Simplenote, my favorite note-taking app, but then I remembered something: The three-person company behind Simplenote was acquired by Automattic, the company behind the WordPress.com blogging software. When you’re creating a wonderful technology product, staying small works for a time, but many companies end up getting bigger — sometimes a lot bigger — or joining a bigger team.